From the time Philip Herbert, the elder of the two sons born to Philip Herbert, 5th earl of Pembroke and his second wife Katherine Villiers, succeeded, his half-brother William Herbert, 6th earl of Pembroke in July 1674 at the age of just 21, he became an object of fascination and horror to newsletter writers. He appeared to embody some of the worst excesses and vices of Charles II’s court. He was clearly favoured by the king and, added to the existing office of custos rotulorum of the southern Welsh counties of Glamorgan and Pembrokeshire which he inherited from his brother at his death, he was also chosen to be lord lieutenant and custos of Wiltshire in May 1675, while it was rumoured for a time that he would be made a gentleman of the bedchamber or even lord chamberlain.
But what truly amazed contemporaries was his capacity for inebriation – one contemporary commented ‘they say he [Pembroke], is a fine gentleman when sober, which I am told is seldom 24 hours together’ – and the consequent acts of random and manic violence committed, which went beyond the mere ‘rakishness’ for which aristocratic society was famed at the time, but verged on the pathologically homicidal.
Having returned to London, on Christmas Day 1677 he and his gang waylaid the chaplain of Charles North, 5th Baron North and Grey, and physically forced him to get drunk with them, overriding his protestations that he was supposed to be preaching and administering communion with ‘many outrageous blasphemies against our blessed lord and the virgin mother’.
Indeed, this was one of Pembroke’s first encounters with Parliament and his peers in the House. He had made a token appearance in the House when he inherited the title, taking his seat on the first day of the session of spring 1675, but thereafter only coming to nine of its meetings. He had registered his proxy with Thomas Butler, Baron Butler of Moore Park, (better known as earl of Ossory [I]) on 10 Oct. 1675 before the second session of that year, but it had been vacated when Pembroke showed up in the House on 8 Nov., although he was only present for that and the following two days. Spending much of 1677 in self-imposed exile at Wilton, he had not attended any meetings of the House during that year, although only three days before the commencement of the session in February 1677, he had registered his proxy with his friend and fellow brawler and swordsman Christopher Monck, 2nd duke of Albemarle. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, deemed Pembroke ‘worthy’ in the spring of 1677, but it is difficult to know on what basis he made this judgment, apart from his long experience with the family (Pembroke’s two immediate predecessors had made Shaftesbury their principal proxy recipient).
On 28 Jan. 1678, about two weeks after Parliament had reconvened following its long adjournment from May 1677, the lord chancellor, Heneage Finch, Baron Finch (later earl of Nottingham) informed the House of Pembroke’s imprisonment for ‘uttering such horrid and blasphemous words ... as are not fit to be repeated in any Christian assembly’. The next day Pembroke’s proxy Albemarle submitted the earl’s petition to the House in which he claimed to ‘detest and abhor’ the words attributed to him and hoped that, as he was accused by only one witness, and a commoner at that, his peers would not believe the horrid accusations against him. The House had a ‘serious’ debate on the petition but eventually voted – with a protest from James Stuart, duke of York, George Berkeley, 9th Baron (later earl of) Berkeley, the two archbishops, and seven bishops – to address the king asking for Pembroke’s release, on the basis that the evidence of a single commoner was not sufficient against the word of a peer denying the fact upon his own honour.
The recognizance was already forfeit by the time Pembroke had entered into it, for on the previous night, 4 Feb., Pembroke had, in a drunken rage in a Haymarket tavern, punched a drinking companion, Nathaniel Cony, to the ground and then kicked and beaten his prone victim so violently that Cony died of internal wounds six days later. At least that was the judgment of the coroner at the inquest on 11 Feb., when Pembroke was found responsible for Cony’s murder. On 1 Mar. Pembroke submitted, through Albemarle (whom Pembroke had made his proxy once again on 23 Feb. 1678), a petition asking for a speedy trial before his peers assembled in time of Parliament, a request that was referred to the committee for privileges. On 6 Mar. the lord privy seal, Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, reported from the committee that, a coroner’s inquisition being deemed too inferior a record on which to try a peer, the king should issue out a commission of oyer and terminer to examine the case and, if the grand jury indicted Pembroke, the earl would be tried by all his peers. On 19 Mar. it was reported that the Middlesex grand jury had found that Pembroke had a case to answer, and a writ of certiorari was issued to bring the case before the authority of the House. The trial was scheduled to be held in Westminster Hall on 4 Apr. 1678, and in the meantime the committee for privileges was to meet to consider the procedures and methods of the trial. One important decision made was that – despite the solitary protest of Shaftesbury – the bishops would be present at the trial to hear the evidence, although they would retire of their own accord at the vote, to avoid having a part in a (potential) sentence of death.
The trial caused great interest among contemporaries and, although it was not seen as a political trial, the earl’s closeness to the court made many contemporaries doubtful that justice would be done. ‘Tis not the general opinion that he will die upon this account, though it was found murder’ was one report.
Sure enough, Pembroke was soon in trouble with his peers again, for on 10 May 1678 the House ordered that the earl, who had not formally sat in the House since 5 Feb., respond to the petition of William Gent against his debtor Elizabeth Clifford, who claimed Pembroke’s protection against any legal action. After Pembroke continuously refused to discuss the matter with Gent, or even to respond to his peers about it on his solitary day of attendance in the House (6 July) during the session of spring 1678, the House ordered that the protection be discharged.
So infamous has Pembroke become for his random and excessive violence that in more recent times it has been suggested that he was the murderer of one of the central figures in the Popish Plot hysteria, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, who had earned the earl’s animosity by acting as foreman of the grand jury which had indicted him in March 1678.
Presumably Pembroke was enjoying his exile back in his fastness of Wilton during the elections to the first Exclusion Parliament, but it is doubtful that he would have expended much thought or activity in exercising his electoral interest in Wiltshire or its boroughs – apart from Wilton itself, where he could oversee the return of his younger and far more upright brother Thomas Herbert, later 8th earl of Pembroke, along with a member of a family long associated with the earls of Pembroke, Thomas Penruddock‡. Although the lord treasurer Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), consistently marked him as an absentee in his calculations of the forces ranged for and against him, Pembroke actually first sat in the House on 22 Mar. 1679, a week after the Parliament had commenced. He then attended the House on a further eight occasions, the greatest number of times he was present in any of the parliamentary sessions of his lifetime. Even when he was not present, he took care of his vote by proxy, and on 5 Apr. 1679 he registered it with Albemarle, only to vacate it when he returned to the House on 16 April.
Pembroke’s last attendance on the House was on 24 May 1679. He does not appear to have exerted himself in influencing elections in either Wiltshire or Glamorgan, apart from ensuring the election of his younger brother, Thomas, and Sir John Nicholas‡, son of the former secretary of state Sir Edward Nicholas‡ and grandson to a steward of the Pembroke household, for the borough of Wilton. Throughout these turbulent political times, Pembroke was occupied in his usual violent and dissolute activities, the most notorious of which was Pembroke’s murder in August 1680 of an officer of the watch, William Smeeth, who stopped his coach at Turnham Green while he was returning from another drinking binge.
Pembroke appears to have retired to Wilton permanently after this second narrow escape to avoid any further trouble; he may have already started his long descent into illness, no doubt exacerbated by years of excessive drinking. He died on 29 Aug. 1683. He left behind him £20,000 worth of debts, a seven-year-old daughter, Charlotte, as heir-general who settled in France and was raised a Catholic by her mother, and as heir to the title, his younger brother, Thomas Herbert – but no will. His wife took out letters of administration on the estate on 20 Dec. 1683, but disputes began almost immediately between the new earl of Pembroke and his sister-in-law over the division of the estate. The dispute initially came to a head in 1685, in the early days of the first Parliament since the 7th earl’s death, when the 8th earl submitted a bill that would give him control of the estate in Wiltshire, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, provided he raise £10,000 for Charlotte’s portion, provide the dowager countess’s jointure and supply maintenance to other members of the family. The crux of the 8th earl’s argument was that their eldest brother, the 6th earl, had originally intended to place all the estate in tail male by his will, but by ‘unskilful penning’ in the will, only the Wiltshire estates had been entailed. This bill was introduced at the beginning of the Parliament but was dropped.